Skip to content
Licensed Unlicensed Requires Authentication Published by De Gruyter Mouton June 5, 2014

Metonymy and word-formation revisited

  • Laura A. Janda EMAIL logo
From the journal Cognitive Linguistics

Abstract

Brdar and Brdar-Szabó (this volume) offer a critique of Janda (2011). Janda (2011) found that the same cognitive strategy that facilitates metonymy, namely use of a conceptual source to access a target, can also be invoked in many patterns of affixal word-formation. In other words, many cases of word-formation appear to be motivated by metonymic association. Brdar and Brdar-Szabó claim that it is incorrect to refer to word-formational processes as metonymies. In addition to the robust parallels evidenced in my data, I offer three arguments to defend my use of the term “metonymy”: (1) a broader definition of metonymy facilitates more insightful generalizations; (2) there is no fixed boundary between lexical metonymy and word-formational metonymy since they coexist in the lexicon-grammar continuum; and (3) context, whether it be a suffix or other cues, is always a factor in metonymy.

Received: 2013-10-9
Revised: 2014-4-14
Accepted: 2014-4-16
Published Online: 2014-6-5
Published in Print: 2014-6-1

©2014 by Walter de Gruyter Berlin/Boston

Downloaded on 29.4.2024 from https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/cog-2014-0008/html
Scroll to top button